Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 is now available featuring a number of enhancements focused largely aligned towards "performance and scalability" functions. The open source founded operating system has achieved the largest multi-core Linux configuration results certified to-date on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark.
Red Hat's Jim Totton has enthused about the new release saying, "The features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 with new impressive SAP benchmark results allow our enterprise customers to have increased confidence that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 can run their enterprise workloads with high performance across physical, virtual, and cloud computing environments."
The company has used these pleasing benchmark results to suggest that enterprises can now "confidently migrate" to the latest multi-core technology with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6. The new release delivers improvements in resource management and high availability, as well as new features aimed at storage and file system performance and identity management. RHEL 6.2 also provides capabilities to manage system resources — for environments that deliver applications or hosted services via multi-tenant environments, maximums can be set for CPU time associated with a given application, business process, or a virtual machine.
- On the latest two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark, RHEL 6 achieved more than 22,000 SAP SD benchmark users on a single system.
- On this same benchmark, the HP DL980 G7 system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 fully utilized all 80 cores and 160 threads in the 8-processor system running MaxDB 7.8 and the SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application.
- This is the largest Linux result submitted to SAP to date. The results demonstrate the capabilities of the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 8-processor system's PREMA architecture and smart CPU caching technology.
According to Red Hat, "When an enterprise deploys its applications to run in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 guest hosted by VMware, the applications can now be utilized for High Availability (HA) Add-Ons. This also includes full support for use of GFS2 shared storage filesystem by the virtual machines. The result is additional deployment flexibility for customers requiring HA within a portion of their virtualized environment, as well as full support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the VMware hypervisor."
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 adds enhancements to storage and filesystem features including full support of iSCSI extension for RDMA. Benefits of low latency and high throughput through a standard SAN implementation based on 10GB Ethernet are also available. Other enhancements include delayed meta data logging, asynchronous and parallel filesystem writes, as well as support for multiple active instances of Samba in a cluster, which improves overall throughput and increases availability for large Samba clustered deployments. Identity Management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 provides the administrative tools to install, server authentication, and authorization in Linux/UNIX enterprise environments, while still providing the option to interoperate with Microsoft Active Directory.
